What Book Are You Reading XV - The Pile Keeps Growing!

[Valka D'Ur]

If I were to physically write out a list of the Merlin fanfiction stories I'm either currently reading, intend to read, or have them handy for other reasons, the list would be over 2 vertical feet long. At least. And that's with small writing.

The characters in Antony & Cleopatra still think Antony's an idiot when it comes to military campaigns.

 

[Arakhor]

The list of stories I've read on AO3 since 2016 is a very long list. If we're writing one per line (so about 35 per sheet of A4), I think that I could easily fill two or three sides myself!

 

[Valka D'Ur]

The list of stories I've read on AO3 since 2016 is a very long list. If we're writing one per line (so about 35 per sheet of A4), I think that I could easily fill two or three sides myself!

I'm talking about stuff I've started reading since December last year.

Listing the Harry Potter stories would use up even more "rolls of parchment". I'm only following one HP story now, on a weekly basis (new chapters come out on Tuesdays). Hermione, due to the marriage laws, is married to Arthur Weasley (Molly and Bill died at the Battle of Hogwarts and the twins are both alive).

The author is Canadian, and a couple of weeks ago she decided that one of Arthur's brothers emigrated to Canada (lives in Saskatchewan). She's sending Arthur and Hermione on a holiday there in a few weeks (in-story time), and asked the readers for suggestions for Canadian folk music that's a bit dated by current standards (the in-story year is 2005).

She got flooded with suggestions, and it'll be interesting to see if any of mine make the cut: various Irish Rovers songs and Stompin' Tom Connors' "The Hockey Song".

 

[Arakhor]

Oh well, you clearly read oceans more fanfic than I do!

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Oh well, you clearly read oceans more fanfic than I do!

I started over 40 years ago, when you could only find it in print form.

It's not all 'ships and smut. I read one yesterday when the knights realized that you really do need to be careful when crossing a frozen river. They ended up rescuing Gwaine from dying of hypothermia, after saving him from drowning (the latter rescue meant he learned about Merlin's magic, but agreed that Arthur doesn't need to know about that).

Which leads me to ask just how frozen do the rivers get in winter in that part of the world? This is something I'm going to need to know for my own stories.

 

[Arakhor]

It's fantasy Britain, so the answer is "as cold as you need them to".

 

[Valka D'Ur]

It's fantasy Britain, so the answer is "as cold as you need them to".

So as long as it serves the plot, I can do whatever I want to your rivers, lakes, and saltwater bodies?

Cool, since I was thinking of turning the Irish Sea into a huge freshwater lake and adjusting the landmasses accordingly. Now I need to know what the would do to the climate, in case I can't realistically pull it off.

 

[Arakhor]

Well, it's the kingdom of Albion (I think), with fantastic monsters, late mediaeval castles and tomato sandwiches, so I think all you need is verisimilitude!

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Well, it's the kingdom of Albion (I think), with fantastic monsters, late mediaeval castles and tomato sandwiches, so I think all you need is verisimilitude!

You're talking about Merlin, roughly 6th century. I'm talking about King's Heir, early 11th century. My version of that part of the world will not have the Crusades, the Plantagenets, the Norman Conquest, or anything else in real history that went on there. Rather than get into religious wars, I just invented one.

I did introduce coracles, though. The setting is largely a capital city of a kingdom on a huge lake (I realized from a map in the game that they had to live on a lake, or the city would be underwater at every high tide and they'd have no fresh drinking water).

There are so many anachronisms in both settings. Merlin has tomatoes and potatoes, neither of which were around at that time and place. The devs who did King's Heir gave one character dialogue that references Shakespeare and the Brothers Grimm. So anachronisms are there.

What I need to know is how the climate of that area would change if the Irish Sea became a huge freshwater lake, rather than a sea connected to the rest of the world's oceans.

 

[Arakhor]

Oh, right! I don't know much about climate, but if the British Isles were cut off from the Gulf Stream, they would be much colder, as the Gulf Stream brings warm water up north.

 

[Takhisis]

Remember that not that many thousands of years ago the sea level was far lower so all the Doggerland (i.e. the land north of the Netherlands and Germany, between Denmark and England) was actually emersed.

Parts of the Black Sea were also above sea level at the same time, so maybe somebody damming up and drying up the Irish Sea polder-style might be practicable if you have an Ice age-like setting, Valka.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Actually, the setting isn't ice-age at all. It starts out in September, 1039 AD, and there's no snow around. Partway through the day it starts raining, and continues raining for the rest of the day. The trees are full of beautiful autumn leaves.

We're not told exactly where this takes place - just that it's the Kingdom of Griffinvale. Given that the characters use a variety of British accents and there are a few Celtic/Druid elements I've noticed... it's fair to say this is an AU Britain setting (or whatever it was known as in 1039). A nearby fishing village screams Norse influence.

Oh, and a few hundred years previously, griffins were verified to have existed.

This point was a bit bemusing when I was watching the first Lancelot episode of Merlin - Lancelot was given credit for killing the griffin, portrayed as a maurading magical beast. Griffins, in King's Heir, are considered dangerous, yes, but also sacred.


@Takhisis: I would like the Irish Sea to be dammed at some point in both north and south, to make it a vast freshwater lake. This has to have happened a LONG time before the beginning of the story, to account for the royal lineage of the ruling family. I calculate that it goes back at least 250 years, and that's well after King Edmund the Great slew his enemies from the back of a griffin, thus saving his people. Part of this battle occurred over the Lake, within sight of a group of fisherfolk, who commemorate it every year in a festival.


I didn't start out to have a lot of magical elements to this story. Actually, none at all, until the last chapter of the game introduced a magical crown. At that point I threw up my hands, said a bunch of 4-letter words, and had to make a decision - either write it and the other major magical part of the story out and substitute something else, or figure out a way to use it, while making it both plausible and something that wouldn't unbalance the rest of the story.

 

[Smellincoffee]

I just finished a little novel of litrpg called Level Up, in which the main character is invited to try a VR rpg trial game, but things go awry and he finds that video game elements have invaded The Real World. It's light fiction, to be sure, but entertaining. Possibly YA fiction, not sure.

“Hell no. I don’t want to make it weird. She’s just out of a serious relationship. I’m just going to work on our friendship.”
“Congrats mate, you’ve maxed out your friend zone skill.”

Carlos scoffs. “I’m getting tired of saying this. You need to stop being you. This is a role-playing game, you need to inhabit the role of a warrior hero. Someone that charges in to battle first and asks questions after the dust has settled.”
“That didn’t exactly work out great in the pub did it?”
“Oh my god, are you still going on about that?”
“Which part, the bit where I died? Yeah, it’s going to take more than half an hour to get over that.”

 

[Takhisis]

Valka, you could try things such as a volcanic winter and/or ‘year without a summer’, which have happened in recorded history. Or a little ice age.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Valka, you could try things such as a volcanic winter and/or ‘year without a summer’, which have happened in recorded history. Or a little ice age.

I want this to be a permanent lake situation. There's a puzzle in the game this is based on that makes it clear that they live on the shore of a lake, not the coast of a sea.

I don't want the setting to be cold except in winter. I just want them to have a huge freshwater lake, rather than a saltwater sea. Most of the people in this setting aren't that well-traveled when it comes to the rest of the world. They know of three kingdoms, plus one or two mysterious places (mostly because I haven't figured them out myself yet). Much of Europe is unknown to most folks in this AU version of the British Isles.

I'm still working out a lot of the in-universe history, as I didn't want to get tied down in real history, real religion, or real wars. There won't be anything happening in the year 1066 in this story other than the comet and whatever in-story stuff is going on. That's over 30 years in my characters' future, at this point.


I did create a kingdom that's more northerly, with a cooler climate and lots of snow in winter. That kingdom was never part of the game itself.

I daresay that most people who have played the game that my story-that-became-series-length is based on aren't going to worry about whether or not the climate makes sense or exactly where I put this. Since the devs had an 11th-century character quoting Shakespeare and the Brothers Grimm, they probably didn't think it through either.

But these are details that occurred to me even during the first time I played it in August 2018. I can't be the only person who would ever notice. So I want to get it at least plausibly possible.

 

[Takhisis]

How about the Giants' Causeway actually being made by giants in the distant past and said giants having also worked on damming the sea between Britain and Ireland?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

How about the Giants' Causeway actually being made by giants in the distant past and said giants having also worked on damming the sea between Britain and Ireland?

I hadn't intended to introduce giants. Honestly, the game's first several chapters were like a straightforward adventure story in which it was possible to simply dismiss the legend of Edwin Griffinrider as a legend.

But then they introduced a magic crown, and the game became historical fantasy. I decided to go with it that at some time in the past in this setting, griffins were real - and probably still are, but have just been in hiding.

At this point I have to ask what the Giants' Causeway is.

I am also thinking that maybe this part of the conversation should be moved to the Watcha Writin'? thread in A&E, since it's going to be years before I'm going to have this thing ready to post for anyone to actually read.

 

[tjs282]

At this point I have to ask what the Giants' Causeway is.

It's a (relatively!) famous rock formation, a series of interlocking hexagonal basalt pillars of varying heights, on the NI coast:

Giant's Causeway - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[Ajidica]

I read CJ Cherryh's Downbelow Station over the weekend. Pretty good space opera with a fairly hard sci-fi background, although my personal quibbles with Cherryh's writing style kept me from fully enjoying it.
I always have a hard time piecing together what is actually happened in the setup to her novels (see spoiler), and character motivation always feels fuzzy (see spoiler).
Solid 7/10 book though. Plenty of good page-turning action, high politics, and space opera in a crunchy hard sci-fi shell. Might try and track down her other books in the Alliance-Union series.

Spoiler :

The big event that kicks off the book is one space station gets destroyed and the Earth Navy drops off a bunch of refugees at Downbelow Station. It comes out later in the book the Earth Navy wanted the space station to be destroyed to lure the Union Navy into overextending themselves and cut off lines of supply. While Cherryh does a good job is capturing the different perspectives and chaos of such an event -the destruction of the space station - the way she writes it and drops info later on in the book means I'm genuinely not sure if the station was destroyed by the Earth Navy after a brief evacuation; or the Union Navy destroyed the station stopping the evacuation. Cherryh goes into the viewpoint of high ranking characters who were there and would know what happened, but never really addressed it.
At the end of the book the Earth Navy carrier Norway goes rogue, splitting from the Earth Navy (which itself had already gone rogue). Cherryh established the Norway was a bit of an odd man out, but going from 'some jurisdictional disputes in a situation nobody had any experience with' to 'killing hundreds of Earth Navy personnel and going rogue because the Earth Navy was becoming the wrong kind of pirates' was just strange; especially as the book made it clear the crew of the Norway had no problem with piracy and it wasn't clear that attempting a coup on Earth crossed any moral line for the crew given their clear dislike and distrust of Earth. You can sort of piece things together after the book, but it feels very weird when reading the book and sort of feels like Cherryh wrote herself into a corner and needed a bit of an ass-pull to wrap up the story without all the likeable characters dying horribly.

 

[Birdjaguar]

IIRC Downbelow Station is one of a series of books about that particular "universe". I have liked most of her Sci Fi stories and the various world building she engaged in. It has been quite a number of years since I read her books though.